Jane Austen's Anglicanism by Laura Mooneyham White (review)

In Jane Austen's Anglicanism, Laura Mooneyham White suggests that Jane Austen's modern readers often assume the novelist could not have been religious because she was satiric, witty, or ironic. Specifically, "The assumption that Austen could not possibly have been a true Christian because her novels and letters demonstrate she was capable of thinking very unkind things—that because she was mean she could not have been pious—lies at the heart of the confusion" (p. 43). White describes D. W. Harding as beginning the trend of such readings with his Scrutiny article, "Regulated Hatred" (1940), and following Harding she cites critics including F. R. Leavis, Avrom Fleishman, and Joseph Duffy. In opposition she describes another group, including Alastair Duckworth and Gene Kippel, who both assert that Austen's fiction reveals her Christian convictions, and Michael Giffin, who identifies Austen as both Christian and Anglican. White asserts that modern readers need to know more about Austen's religious context; her book, however, does not argue in detail against perceived misreading.

An overview of this study holds promise for thorough coverage of the topic. Divided into two parts, "Jane Austen and Anglicanism" and "The Sins of the Author," the book comprises five chapters: "Jane Austen's Religious Inheritance: The Georgian Church," "Jane Austen as an Anglican and Anglicanism in the Novels," "Austen and the Anglican Worldview," "Wordplay, Candor, and Malice," and "Worldmaking." Despite the chapters' potential, the book is too short and too thin to provide the necessary exposition. It does not offer a full and focused account of Anglicanism in Austen's day, and White slides from Anglicanism to a more generic morality without fully showing what is distinctly Anglican. Establishing what Anglicans believed in Austen's lifetime is harder than it looks. Despite the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles, Anglicans did not (and do not) all think as one. To address the topic of Austen's Anglicanism, one must read extensively in eighteenth-century theology, conduct literature, fiction, poetry, and letters. Here in particular White's book seems thin. She references pertinent authors, including Samuel Johnson, Thomas Sherlock, William Law, Joseph Addison, and Hannah More. Johnson she calls "a stalwart of orthodoxy" and Sherlock "one of Austen's favorite writers of sermons," but in neither case does thorough analysis follow to establish what characterized Johnson's orthodoxy or what Sherlock does to distinguish himself as an Anglican (pp. 28, 12). Particularly disappointing is the treatment of the Book of Common Prayer. White asserts, probably quite rightly, that modern readers do not grasp how liturgy affects its participants. She notes on three occasions that Austen would have said the Lord's Prayer "over 30,000 times in her life," but she does not explore the implications of this prayerful repetition (pp. 5, 33, 46).

Another point demanding further discussion is the concept of Providence and its implications for both the Anglican and the novelist. Providence has been a good deal discussed in scholarship associated with eighteenth-century narrative technique, including the work of Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and—of particular interest to readers of Austen—Samuel Richardson. This work is not considered; in fact, many of White's references to eighteenth-century writers are glancing rather than probing. She tends to list and quote briefly, sometimes referring to major figures like Addison "as quoted in" a secondary work (see pp. 91 and 150, for example). Finally, the book concludes with a "coda" on Oscar Wilde that seems intrusive (pp. 185-95). Though it might belong in a study of religion or morality in nineteenth-century literature, this piece has not been thoroughly integrated into the discussion of Austen and distracts more than it augments.

Readers will find White an unpretentious and accessible writer. Unfortunately, however, the book has suffered bad editing at every point of production, and errors remain, both in style and content. One finds sentences such as this one: "Neither Frank Churchill nor Mr. Weston were born...